2026-09-20 (second run) — Ten new entries: two pronouns, eight prepositions
This is a report on the fifteenth automated session ("Routine run") for the TKG English Learner's Dictionary, an original English-English dictionary for intermediate and advanced learners, built one word ("entry") at a time and stored as one file per word. The built-in job selector chose build mode — drafting entries the dictionary does not yet have — because it had the highest backlog among the eligible jobs. No unfinished work was left over from the previous session, beyond one harmless leftover reference to a branch on the remote server, which was cleared automatically.
What was drafted
Ten entries: the pronouns neither and nobody, and eight prepositions — about, above, across, after, against, along, among, around. An earlier session had asked that seven closely related "quantifier" pronouns (words like neither, nobody, some) be drafted only one or two at a time, since they are unusually easy to get subtly wrong together; this run followed that advice, filling the rest of the batch with common prepositions instead.
Each entry goes through a fixed pipeline: it is drafted from the session's own knowledge (never copied from a published dictionary); an automated checker verifies its structure; two independent outside AI reviewers, from different companies than the one running this session, each check every part against a checklist and flag anything they think is wrong; the session then reads every flag and decides whether the reviewer is right (and fixes it), wrong (and says why, on the record), or the two disagree with each other (which goes to a human curator's queue). Only then is an entry published.
What the reviewers caught
The reviewers raised 41 concerns; 33 were accepted and fixed, 8 rejected with a logged reason. Reviewer precision — how often an objection held up once checked — was 76% and 92%, both normal.
The most substantial finding affected two entries at once. Standard English treats a phrase like "about ten dollars" or "around noon," where the word shows a number is not exact, as a different part of speech (an adverb) from the same word's use before a place, as in "walking about the room." Both about and around had mixed the two together under "preposition"; the reviewers caught this independently for both words, and the approximate-number sense was removed from each and queued to be drafted separately later. About had a second such problem: "be about to," meaning "going to happen very soon," was filed as a preposition use when it is standardly an adjective; also removed and queued.
Other real fixes: neither's notes claimed a plural verb after it ("neither of them are ready") was merely relaxed usage, when it is actually standard, accepted English; broadened. Around's core definition defined the word using a close variant of itself ("surrounding"); reworded. A few example phrases had been filed under the wrong sense and were moved.
Not every objection was accepted. One claimed an example sentence had no grammatical object for the word "above" — but it did, once the missing word was traced to a pronoun standing in for it; rejected. Another claimed a well-established grammar rule (that "along with" never changes whether the main verb is singular or plural) was wrong; it is not, so that was rejected too, along with a third objection that repeated a previously-logged pattern of misreading a "mainly used in" label as "used only in." The preposition against needed no fixes at all.
Separately, a small drafting mistake was caught before it reached a reviewer: the British pronunciation given for nobody had mistakenly copied the American stress pattern. It was corrected and re-verified before the entry was finished.
A small tool problem, logged for later
This session noticed that the pronunciation-checking tool leaves a stale "disputed" warning on an entry even after the pronunciation is later corrected and re-verified as fine. Following the project's rule against fixing things mid-session on a whim, this was written up as a note for a future scheduled maintenance pass rather than patched now.
Results and spend
All ten new entries pass every automated check: structural validation, the defining-vocabulary word-choice discipline (six violations found and fixed by rewording), formatting limits, cross-reference consistency, and the full test suite (297 tests). Cost so far today: about 32 cents of the $5 daily budget.
What's next
The five remaining quantifier pronouns (none, nothing, other, some, what) are still waiting, one or two per future run. Fifteen large entries still need their prose brought up to the dictionary's current formatting convention, unchanged today. The next housekeeping ("lint") pass is due in a few more runs. Nothing here needs the owner beyond the three items already open: turning on the public website, and two small style questions on the open-questions page.